I have long been pointing out how the biggest of Big Businesses - along with some select foreign governments - dictate law and policy in the United States.
Washington, D.C., is their butcher. Slicing up the U.S. and selling it by the pound.
I describe D.C. law-writing thus:
DC’s Cronies place their hands on pieces of paper. And DC traces them with law they write. Everything inside the hands represents the entirety of those businesses and their practices. And D.C. makes it all legal, thereby transmogrifying a lot of once illegal things into legal things. Because they’re now inside the new lines.
D.C. doesn’t enforce the law so much as it rewrites it when its Cronies break it. And We the People are always left on the outside looking in.
To wit: Big Tech certainly dictates terms to D.C.
The Internet is now three decades old. D.C. still hasn’t passed ANY privacy law regarding our digital data. Why no such law? Because Big Tech doesn’t want it.
Big Tech has made many tens of trillions of dollars selling everything about us completely unfettered by any legal limitations, and they would very much like to continue doing so. As a result, D.C. remains eternally inert.
Oh: And there will be just as much Artificial Intelligence (AI) legislation as there’s been privacy legislation. Because Big Tech doesn’t want any of that either.
The Big Banks certainly dictate terms to D.C., too, and they have for many decades now, though it was not always this way. D.C. long ago passed the 1933 Banking Act. Contained therein was something called Glass-Steagall, which prevented your retail bank from also being an investment bank. Meaning they couldn’t put your life savings into way-riskier hedge fund-like activities.
Well, in the 1970s, Lewis Ranieri created the mortgage-backed-security (MBS), which was the bundling of thousands of retail bank home mortgages - and transmogrifying them into an investment product, blurring the Glass-Steagall lines and rapidly making the banks VERY rich.
Flush with all of this new cash, the banks began seriously lobbying D.C. Shocker: It worked.
Beginning in the 1980s, D.C. engaged in ever-more-lax Glass-Steagall enforcement, and in 1999 finally, fully repealed it.
Investment banks and retail banks were unleashed. Fully free to intermingle, merge, consolidate and acquire.
Anyone else starting to get those “Too Big to Fail” vibes?
Your allegedly safe savings accounts? They were now piled into the craziest of crazy hedge fund schemes.
And in 2008? The Big Banks - with their MBSs and derivatives thereof - eviscerated the entire global economy, wiping out everyone.
Well, not quite everyone. D.C.’s response was to hand the Big Banks $29 trillion.
And then let them write their very own “reform” law: 2010’s Dodd-Frank Act, which is murdering the few small, local banks that are left, thereby making it even easier for the Big Banks to continue their consolidation.
Another long-running Big Bank-Big Government scam? The way we assign and rate financial credit and its scores, which we have previously addressed. And which brings us to the aforementioned Dave Ramsey. For those who don’t know…:
“David Lawrence Ramsey III is an American radio personality who offers financial advice. He co-hosts the nationally syndicated radio program The Ramsey Show, and is the founder and CEO of Ramsey Solutions. Ramsey has written several books, including The New York Times bestseller The Total Money Makeover, and hosted a television show on Fox Business from 2007 to 2010.”
Ramsey is, like me, pretty hardcore anti-debt. Meaning if you can help it? Don’t have any.
But D.C. decades ago force-converted the US into a 70-plus percent consumption economy, which means we all must spend—always, all the time—whether we have money or not. And for many years now, we haven’t. Hence the U.S.’s record $18.39 trillion in total household debt.
And here’s the criminally crony part. You build up your FICO credit score not when you have money…but when you don’t…and have to borrow it from the Big Banks.
Crony Fascism: Debit Cards Don't Build Credit - But Credit Cards Do:
“If you spend your own money via your debit card - connected to your checking account - into which you have already placed your money?
“You credit score doesn’t change. At all. No matter how much you spend. No matter how often you use your debit card to spend it….
“However: If you borrow the Big Banks’ money - via their credit cards? And then pay back even a tiny fraction of what you borrow from them each month?
“Your credit score skyrockets. Even if you only pay back a little - while skyrocketing your credit card debt a lot.”
Ramsey certainly understands how criminal and stupid this is. Behold this video short, in which he observes:
“And this is how dumb our culture is. My FICO is zero. I can go to the local apartment complex down the road down here. It’s really nice - because we’re in a nice area.
“And I can walk up and they say ‘What’s your FICO score?’ And I say ‘I don’t have one. I don’t borrow money.’
“And I can’t rent an apartment there. Now, I can write a check and buy the complex.
“This is how asinine this is. This is stupid. And the idea that we all fell for this crap is ridiculous. It’s a Bankers’ scam.
“Because the whole purpose of FICO is to get you into debt…so that you can run your score up…so that you can get into debt…so that you can run your score up…so that you can get into debt…so you can run your score up.…
“You’ve been making out with the bank if you’ve got an 800 credit score.”
I would love to have a conversation with Mr. Ramsey to see if he agrees with me about the all-encompassing awfulness of a 70-plus percent consumption economy, about how the Big Businesses—including the Big Banks—have worked with D.C. to rig it to their maximum corrupt advantage. And most fundamentally: How it is completely antithetical to the bedrock principles for individual, family and national security and advancement.
Those principles? Avoid debt. And save money rather than spend it.
Methinks Mr. Ramsey and I would get along pretty well.